Ooyala Flex 6.0.0 Release Notes 2017-08-17

What's New

With this release, we continue the commitment to listen to our customers, focus on
performance, and quickly respond with new features and fixes. This update offers features
that add more depth to how you can create and manage metadata and new tools to enable the
management and publishing of your content.

Temporal Metadata

We have extended our asset model to support temporal metadata mapped to timelines in MAM.
A timeline enables you to mark an event when it occurs during a video, and enter metadata to
describe that event.

For example: you have a video of a soccer match. Every time a goal is scored, you could
place a marker or range which contains metadata to describe the details of the goal such as:
the player who scored it, the goalkeeper, the team, and so on.

Dynamic Timelines

With Dynamic timelines you can have multiple timelines for a single asset, each with its
own defined Metadata, this allows the creation of timelines for specific elements in an
assets lifecycle, event specifics, scene descriptors, soundtrack, product placement, legal,
etc. that can be managed by separate teams. These timelines are configured using the
Metadata Designer and are available in MAM and Reviewer. To configure a timeline in the
Metadata Designer, you must do the following:

Create a variant

Create a timeline

Create a metadata definition and assign it to a timeline

Note: The functionality that enables you to create variants has been moved into the Metadata
Designer. From 6.0.0 onwards, when you click the Variant option, a Variants page opens in
the Metadata Designer.

Object Hierarchy Management

We have added the ability to manage user defined hierarchical structures in MAM. This
allows you to: view, navigate, and create metadata instances which reflect data structures
in a visual / interactive panel for advanced business reporting.

Note: Hierarchy / object definitions and configurations should be done in the Ooyala Flex
interface. MAM allows a user to manage the instances of the metadata.

Plugins

Azure Media Encoder: this gives you access to the full breadth of the cloud
based encoding features of the Standard Media Encoder within Azure Media Services as
another transcoding resource for Ooyala Flex users.

New Replace Content Plugin: this plugin enables the replacement of assets in
Ooyala Flex. The process overwrites the existing asset maintaining metadata that you
have already applied with new technical metadata from the updated asset as a seamless
process.

End of Review: a new configuration has been added to the Start Session plugins,
to enable you to customize the status buttons for the end of the review session. These
buttons can move beyond Review/Approve to allow you have custom statuses like ‘Approve',
‘Reject', ‘Publish to Social’, or ‘Archive'. For each button, you can choose what label
is displayed, what color the button should have, and whether metadata is associated with
the status that this button represents.

DIVArchive Video Restore: this new plugin gives you the ability to either restore
a whole video or perform a partial restore on a video that is currently in your
DIVArchive directly from Ooyala Flex. You can only restore a single asset at a time.

Publish/Unpublish to Twitter: this enables you to publish or unpublish a video to
Twitter, you can also publish/unpublish a tweet with the video.

Remote Backlot Ingest: With this new feature you can now remove the need for HTTP
transfer of assets to Backlot and instead move the asset to S3 storage along with the
associated metadata sidecar that Backlot can access. This is especially useful for large
assets and creates a reliable solution for publishing files through the Ooyala Video
Platform.

REST API

Timelines: new REST endpoints have been added in 6.0.0, in relation to
timelines. These endpoints enable you to:

Create new timelines

Edit existing timelines

Delete timelines

Retrieve information for a specific timeline

Retrieve a list of all existing timelines

These are as follows:

Resource

Endpoint

Method

timelines:

/timelines

get / post

timelines:

/timelines{timelineId}

get / put / delete

Reviews: we have added REST endpoints that help you work with review sessions. This
includes the ability to:

Work with actions in review sessions

Set "end of review" statuses

Post and edit annotations

These are as follows:

Resource

Endpoint

Method

assets:

/assets/{assetId}/reviews

get

assets:

/assets/{assetId}/reviews/{reviewId}

get / delete

assets:

/assets/{assetId}/reviews/{reviewId}/actions

get / post

assets:

/assets/{assetId}/reviews/{reviewId}/comments

get

assets:

/assets/{assetId}/reviews/{reviewId}/statuses

get

assets:

/assets/{assetId}/reviews/{reviewId}/statuses/{reviewer}

get / put

assets:

/assets/{assetId}/reviews/{reviewId}/annotations

post

assets:

/assets/{assetId}/reviews/{reviewId}/annotations/{annotationId}

put

UDOT: the following endpoints have been introduced to coincide with support
for object hierarchies in MAM. These endpoints enable you to manage user defined object
hierarchies.

Resource

Endpoint

Method

userDefinedObjectTypes:

/userDefinedObjectTypes

get / post

userDefinedObjectTypes:

/userDefinedObjectTypes/{udotId}

get / put

userDefinedObjectTypes:

/userDefinedObjectTypes/{udotId}/hierarchy

get

Members: We have added the group matrix parameter to the
/assets/<assetId>/members. This parameter enables you to retrieve a list of group
members and exclude all of the items in the group such as any media assets, image
assets, and so on. Examples:

In order to retrieve just the group members, you would
do the following- api/assets/members;group=true.

In order to only list
the group items, you would do the following- api/assets/members;group=false.

Publish API

An endpoint has been added to the Publish API, which
retrieves group hierarchies. This is as
follows:

/public/api/assets/<groupId>/hierarchy

Keywords and Metadata

Forms: a new field type, Tag Collection, enables you to create a new tag
collection, or to add, rename, or delete tags in an existing tag collection.

Known Issues

MAM

Please note the following known issues in MAM:

Bulk metadata only supports multiplicities for basic string, text, long, integer, and
multiple values with simple variable types. Multiplicities are also only supported for
complexes with simple variable types.

VFS locations are not currently supported in MAM.

Only a certain number of root object types are shown in the left-hand toolbar; any
additional root objects will not be visible.

Free text search is supported, with limited advanced search.

Temporal metadata is not currently searchable.

UDO descriptions are not currently searchable.

Reviewer

Currently, we don't support tags in Reviewer. Support for this will be added in the
next release.

SDKs

The SDK call getUserDefinedObjects() now requires a context
parameter, whose value can be null or all. The value
all returns a list of all UDOs, including children in the hierarchy.
This change will be backward compatible from the 6.1.0 release.

Reindexing

Reindexing by account ID does not work.

Resolution

This will be fixed in the 6.0.2 release.

Expression Language

The expression event/mioObject will be deprecated, and should only be used when the
event only includes mioObject.

event.flexManagedObject can be used for both mioObject and
mioJob.

Therefore, the following changes have been made to configuration of expressions:

For the Message template, use event.flexManagedObject instead of
event.mioObject.

For Event handler expressions, use event.flexManagedObject instead of
event.mioObject.

Job Searchability

Jobs are no longer searchable from Global Search. Nor do jobs support a full text search.
Instead, they are searchable by specific filters, such as owner,
deleted, and status.

Upgrade Instructions

For those upgrading from previous versions, upgrade
instructions can be found here.

Appendix

Service

Version

Required Instructions

flex-admin-app

2.0.456

flex-authentication-service

7.5.292

flex-authorisation-service

2.3.293

flex-dataagreggation-service

1.4.377

flex-divarchive-service

2.1.325

flex-events-service

2.7.339

flex-fastobject-service

3.3.350

flex-forms-service

0.0.139

flex-imageproxy-service

3.2.284

flex-indexelastic-service

5.9.345

flex-job

6.0.0.6

flex-mam-app

flex-master

6.0.0.6

flex-metadatadesigner-app

2.2.917

flex-metadatamerge-service

2.2.335

flex-outboundtransfer-service

2.0.219

flex-publish-service

9.3.370

Upon upgrade, you must move KV from flex/flex-publish-service/url to
flex/shared/urls/flex-publish-service.

This requires reindexing ElasticSearch indexes. Use the following api:
/api/accounts/<accountid>